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As industry encroaches, Yukoners make last stand to preserve unspoiled wilderness

Thousands of mining claims have been staked in the Peel River watershed, threatening a landscape unchanged for millennia.

Bonnet Plume Lake lies on the edge of the Peel River watershed. Large mining camps sit just over the ridge, as exploration companies wait for the Yukon government to lift a moratorium on staking in the wilderness area. (PAUL WATSON / TORONTO STAR)

Hunting outfitter Chris Widrig, right, almost lost his life to a grizzly bear attack 12 years ago. He was left blind in one eye, with titanium plates and 200 stitches in his face. But along with veteran guide Jimmy Johnny, left, Widrig remains a passionate defender of the Peel watershed wilderness against mining and other industrial encroachment. (PAUL WATSON / TORONTO STAR)

BONNET PLUME LAKE, YUKON—In the long, often biting, argument over the Peel River wilderness, few places rouse more passion than a region below Aberdeen Canyon, where nature still has the upper hand over humans.

Here the Wind, Bonnet Plume and Snake Rivers reach like long fingers across a mountainous landscape.

They put a lifelong grip on anyone lucky enough to feel their touch.

The only way in is by air. There’s a steady, growing traffic of helicopters and float planes ferrying mining exploration crews to and from remote camps or dropping off well-heeled hunters and adventurous paddlers with their canoes and kayaks.

I flew into Bonnet Plume Lake, around 435 kilometres north of Whitehorse, in Alpine Aviation’s 1952 vintage de Havilland Beaver, a stalwart single-engine bush plane.

As we climbed, he chatted over our headphones about his journey from ski guide to bush pilot.

He’s never been busier.

Veteran bush pilots aren’t easily surprised. But Hébert did a double take earlier this year when, for the first time, he took an all-Chinese team of mining engineers into an exploration camp about 160 kilometres south of Bonnet Plume Lake.

They were dressed in business suits, with Armani luggage, and brought along their own cook from China, Hébert said. And they were obviously happy to be heading into one of mining’s hottest new frontiers.

Mining camps are pressing in on the edges of the Peel. A large one sits just over the ridge from Bonnet Plume Lake, which is inside the zone temporarily protected by a Yukon government moratorium.

The camp, in an area rich with gold, has some 35 large white tents and a few wood-frame buildings, all connected by dirt roads and a bridge. Two helicopters sat on pads.

It is a bustling community in a shrinking wilderness, on the banks of a river that runs wild at the foot of a mountain.

Yukon government records show there were 8,431 mining claims staked in the Peel watershed at the start of this year, said Karen Baltgailis, executive director of the Yukon Conservation Society.

To show how close mining companies have come to the boundaries of the Peel, and what’s at risk, she invited me to spend a few days on Bonnet Plume Lake, hiking in the surrounding mountains and along the headwaters of the Bonnet Plume River.

We stayed at a lakeshore camp run for the past quarter-century by Chris Widrig, who normally houses hunters hoping to shoot Dall sheep, moose, caribou and grizzly bears.

Widrig has the outfitting rights for some 10,000 square kilometres of wilderness in northeast Yukon. He brings in 27 clients a year to the exclusive concession, granted by the Yukon government, along the border with the Northwest Territories.

Since 1986, hunters have come from around the world to track animals on horseback with Widrig and kill them as trophies. What sounds barbaric to some is to him a sustainable way of making a good living from the Peel wilderness, and so protecting it.

He has a profound love and respect for the wild, earned the hard way.

Twelve years ago, Widrig was leading a hunting party back to camp on horseback after bagging two Dall sheep, when he startled a feeding mountain grizzly bear and her two-year-old cub high above the Snake River.

The angry sow charged. On foot, and without a weapon — he had lent his rifle to a client whose airline lost his luggage — Widrig bolted. But he knew grizzlies too well to think he could outrun one, especially across spongy tundra above the treeline.

The bear took him down, and chomped on his face and hands. Widrig remembered it sounding like the crunching of chicken wings. The grizzly’s jaws clamped shut on his shin and broke it.

The mauling didn’t stop until another hunter fired a shot that missed but frightened off the bear. That saved Widrig’s life.

It took more than half a day to reach camp, where a chopper medevaced him to hospital. Surgeons used titanium plates, and more than 200 stitches, to rebuild his ravaged face.

Yet Widrig insisted the bear not be tracked down and shot. It was only doing what a mother should: protecting her young. The hunter had no quarrel with her.

An enraged wild animal he can forgive. What Widrig can’t abide are short-sighted politicians who see no harm in letting mining companies encroach on a last refuge as pure as the Peel.

Even the explorers are doing damage, said Widrig, who recently found a mine staking flag illegally inside the no-staking zone near his second hunting camp at Goz Lake.

“Jeez, they’d all be in here crawling around if the government lifted the moratorium,” he said. “Right now, they’re diamond drilling (on the border). They’re looking for someplace to have a proven mine.

“They’re building roads between some of their claims, where they use quads (all-terrain vehicles). They’re scarring the landscape.”

Even though the grizzly attack destroyed Widrig’s left eye, he flies his own Piper Super Cub, a float plane with two seats squeezed one behind the other into the fuselage. It’s like a dirt bike with wings.

Widrig took me up for an hour-long spin, cruising low over unnamed peaks and massive glaciers, hanging above green meadows where herds of caribou and Dall sheep grazed, bulking up for the looming winter.

Duck-billed dinosaur bones have been unearthed near the Bonnet Plume, and as we flew over a landslide that had swept across the river valley thousands of years ago, I could only think of how small humans are next to eternity.

If miners ever got in to dig out the Bonnet Plume basin’s extensive coal deposits, surely nature would reclaim the lost wilderness in its own time. But would humans still be around to see this millennial restoration?

Jimmy Johnny, an elder of the Na-Cho Nyak Dun First Nation, has worked in the Peel since he was 13 years old, first as a horse wrangler and then as a hunting guide.

He wears a sweat-stained Stetson, a faded Wrangler jacket and black jeans cinched up by a leather belt and silver buckle, shaped into two hearts and a horsehead.

Surrounded by nattering visitors, Johnny is silent, always watching the horizon for wildlife. When he pointed out twin moose at the end of the lake, they were indiscernible specks to the rest of us.

He spotted a wolf sniffing along the lakeside long before it noticed us. It trotted back into the bush.

I followed Johnny along muddy dirt tracks cut through the bush by generations of animals in their plodding search for food, water or a mate. Deep hoof prints of caribou and moose mixed with the clawed paw prints of wolves and grizzlies.

In his leather-gloved left hand, he carried a .30-30 Winchester rifle, mended with black electrical tape.

“Do you know what my dad said to me when I was 11 years old and he handed me that rifle?” Johnny asked. “He told me, ‘It’s time for you to go out alone and hunt.’ I shot a moose.”

His right hand clutched a small black camera bag carrying his Nikon digital camera and a videocam.

In the bush, Johnny is trigger-ready to shoot and kill any dangerous animal. But given the chance, he’ll shoot its picture instead.

“This place gives me peace,” Johnny said, trying to explain what the Peel means to him, and why he’s so determined to protect it.

Just over 240 kilometres southwest of Bonnet Plume Lake, in the Tintina Valley, roughly midway between the iconic Nahanni and Kluane national parks, the town of Faro welcomes visitors with a broad wooden sign.

It’s across the road from a giant red mining truck, and surrounded by a flower garden; “Yukon’s Best Kept Secret,” it proudly declares.

They’re not talking about the one that would startle most Canadians.

Once home to the world’s largest lead-zinc mine, Faro is a testament to the toxic damage mining can do.

Federal taxpayers are stuck with the bill for cleaning up one of Canada’s worst environmental disasters. The official estimate of $700 million is likely to reach $1 billion or more, environmental activists predict.

The mess will require constant, meticulous care for decades to come.

Two water treatment plants filter out toxins from the mine tailings. Regular coatings of liquid plastic spray keep toxic dust from drifting on the wind. Soil and rock removed from the enormous open-pit mines must be sealed in plastic before they can be covered in a clean layer of soil.

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